Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur by Ian McDonald Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: dinosaurs, dystopian, post apocalyptic, science fiction, time travel
Pages: 128
Published by Tordotcom on February 3, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
How to Train Your Dragon meets Mad Max in this story of an orphan in a fractured Southwest who just wants to ride a dinosaur under the lights.
Come one, come all to the dinosaur rodeo!
Tif Tamim wants nothing more than to be a dinosaur buckaroo. An orphan in search of a place to rest his head and a job to weigh down his pockets, Tif has bounced from circus to circus, yearning for a chance to ride a prehistoric beauty under the sparkling lights of a big-top.
To become a buckaroo, Tif needs to learn the tools of the trade, yet few dino maestros want to take a scrawny nobody from nowhere under their wing. But when Tif frees a dino from an abusive owner and braves the roving gangs of the formerly-American west to bring the dino to safety, he catches someone’s eye. And boy, how those eyes dazzle Tif from the back of a bucking carnosaur.
My Review:
The opening scene of this book is absolutely, even cinematically, iconic. To the point where the reader can almost see it as the opening of a new Mad Max movie – except for one rather large detail.
It’s the scene of a young man pedaling a dusty but serviceable bicycle on a cracked and ruined highway in a blasted post-apocalyptic landscape. With a DINOSAUR walking beside him.
That’s right, a dinosaur. What’s that doing here? There? Whichever. Dinosaurs and humans never coexisted. At least not yet.
The story begins a bit in its middle, but in a way that absolutely does work. Because it starts with the boy and the dinosaur that he has definitely acquired by accident. Not that he didn’t always WANT a dinosaur, just that he never expected to be walking down the road with one.
He was hoping to RIDE dinos in the dino rodeos. (A phrase that needs serious unpacking – and gets it – in this story.)
So, first, the story backtracks to how Tif Tamim found himself on the road with an old, rather beat up, dinosaur, heading towards the nearest dino rodeo or circus so that he can deliver the poor dino back to its home in the Triassic era by way of the B2T2 time machine.
Even more to unpack there – and unpacking all of it forms the backbone of the rest of the story.
And it’s a doozy.
Escape Rating B: I picked this one up purely for the title. Seriously, there’s just so much to unpack in those four words, and whatever it was, I NEEDED to know.
What I got is one of those ‘story blender’ books – and it has to be a ‘story’ blender instead of a ‘book’ blender because not all the stories that got thrown into this blender are – or ever were – in books.
So start with the Mad Max movies, because the scenario is very much a Mad Max style blasted landscape, post-apocalyptic, dystopian setting. With perhaps a touch of Junkyard Cats for the distinctly American brand of the way that the country split into regions and races and religions and factions. (I’m not so sure about that reference to How to Train Your Dragon. You’d have to mentally squint a LOT to make that work IMHO and your reading (and viewing) mileage may definitely vary.)
Then add in a combination of The Kaiju Preservation Society or Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile. Both are stories where portals open up between contemporary Earth and either times or places or both where either humanity hasn’t effed up the planet – YET – or where the ultimate in charismatic megafauna are the dominant species. Or both.
The question that pops up almost instantly is the one about ‘for every action there’s an equal or opposite reaction.’ Or the Jurassic Park version of ‘just because we could doesn’t mean we should.’
It’s possible that the time grabbing machine that’s picking up dinosaurs and depositing them on this near-future Earth is at least part of the cause of the current post-apocalyptic dystopian mess of the place.
But however much the time traveling dinos may be the cause of this mess, the story is about the effect. Not necessarily the effect on either the planet or on humanity – although both certainly play into it.
The story is about the effect on individual humans, which is how we wind this back to the boy doing his damndest to take the dinosaur to where it can get all the way home. Because the story is about him doing the same thing. Only in his case, it’s both forward and back to his found family, the brother he was forced to leave behind and the circus that adopts him into their hearts – along with his dinosaur.
And allows him one, bright, shining moment to be who he’s always wanted to be. A rhinestone buckaroo riding a dino.
While there’s a romance that doesn’t quite work (at least not for this reader) buried in the story of the boy and the dino and the circus, the thing as a whole worked pretty damn well, and absolutely did manage to live up to its fantastic title.
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